Users are encouraged to use the latest version unless a specific feature or requirement warrants using an older version of the software. Version specific instructions and installation notes are provided below.

Note: As of version 4.4.1, Octave no longer supports Windows XP. There may be some workarounds to get Octave installed and running in command line mode (see Bug #54662), but maintainers cannot provide support and troubleshooting for this beyond what has already been documented.

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The easiest way to install GNU Octave on Microsoft Windows is by using MXE builds. For the current release, both 32-bit and 64-bit installers and zip archived packages (.zip and .7z formats) can be found at https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/windows/.

For executable installers: the user can simply run the downloaded file and follow the on-screen installation prompts. It is recommended that the installation path does not include spaces or non-ASCII characters. Shortcuts to the program will be created automatically.

For the 7z/zip archives:

Extract the file content to a directory on the harddrive (such as C:\Octave). Spaces or non-ASCII characters in the path are discouraged and may cause program errors.

Manually create a shortcut to the octave.vbs file in the main installation directory. (Right-click on the file, select 'Create Shortcut', and move the new shortcut to your desired location.)

If a command-line only instance of Octave is desired, the user can create a shortcut as stated above, right-click on the shortcut, select Properties, and add --no-gui to the end of the Target field.

Run the post-install.bat file before running Octave the first time to reduce plot delays due to the Windows font cache and make the pre-installed packages visible to the system.

A selection of pre-built, Octave Forge packages are included with for all versions of the official Windows release. If you following the installation directions above you can confirm the package list by typing the command below at the Octave command prompt:

Note that a security related issue in Windows XP currently prevents Octave from retrieving packages from the website automatically. When running under that Operating System manual package installation is necessary.

/pub/hg/octave/src/data.cc : 8 failures due to different handling of complex Inf on sort
/pub/hg/octave/src/syscalls.cc: 1 failure on fork. This disappears when octave is installed
/pub/hg/octave/scripts/sparse/svds.m: 1 failure due to test sensitivity on starting point. See
https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/octave-maintainers/2011-September/024715.html

To build GNU Octave from cygwin source package, you need to install "cygport" and the relevant development libraries

Be advised that GNU Octave is primarily developed on GNU/Linux and other POSIX conform systems. The ports of GNU Octave to Microsoft Windows use different approaches to get most of the original Octave and adapt it to Microsoft Windows idiosyncrasies (e.g. dynamic libraries, file paths, permissions, environment variables, GUI system, etc). Bear this in mind and don't panic if you get unexpected results. There are a lot of suggestions on the mailing lists for tuning your Octave installation. GNU Octave standalone ports for Windows are independently compiled using either the MinGW or Microsoft Visual Studio development environments (3.6 or before).